Star Citizen
This is your community for everything related to Star Citizen - an up and coming epic space sim MMO being developed by Chris Roberts and Cloud Imperium Games.
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And in X3 I can fly into a system and see one of the competing factions send in an invasion force to try and take over the system. The invasion force consists of multiple different classes of ships with a mothership, several battleships, support vessels and fighters. They all engage in a collaborative manner and take a defined offensive position. The defending faction tries to get all of its forces into a defensive fleet with even police patrols joining. As they can't manage the defence, they request backup from the neighbouring system. Eventually forces arrive and after a big battle the invading fleet decides to retreat. This is all happening in a dynamic manner; I am literally just a random ship passing by through the system.
The point I making is that the specific package of features is not that relevant.
What's relevant is that they are marketing insane functionality and selling trading/hauling ships for hundreds or even thousands of dollars (some in JPEG form for over a decade) and yet the trade gameplay is comically crude. And this is after ~13 years and ~$750 million allegedly spent on development.
X3 sounds awesome... But it's a single player game... Along with the other examples you've provided. There's a large difference between developing a single player game, and developing an MMO game.
I got into Star Citizen as a former Eve Online player because I always wanted an MMO like Eve, but with the ability to actually run around inside my ship, land on planets, and board other ships if I wanted to.
The planned market for Star Citizen sounds very similar to what Eve Online already has going, which I'm all for. I don't see any reason to doubt that they're working on it. They have continued to consistently release major updates every year, controversy and all. It's definitely taking longer than any of us would have hoped, but there is progress, and we can play it right now.
The market isn't there yet. Like I said, it's barely more than what you can do in Sea of Thieves right now. But there's way more to the game than just the market.
And yes, they do sell ships at insane prices, but no one needs to buy those to play the game. You can loot/find/rent/buy/borrow/hijack anything in this game that can be bought externally.
If anyone is jumping straight into the game and dropping thousands of dollars upfront, they're either very bad with monetary decisions, or they have enough money that they don't care.
Personally, I followed the game development for about a year before I was satisfied that it wasn't a scam, and only then did I actually buy a starter package. It took me another 3 years before I spent anything else on the game, and that's only because I was satisfied with the progress that they had made in that time.
And $750 million for 13 years of development doesn't sound like a lot to me, especially compared to the operating cost of other MMOs like WoW. Their operating costs were close to $50 million/year about 20 years ago, and I can only imagine that those costs have continued to go up since then:
https://www.wired.com/2008/09/total-operating/
Could someone else have made a better game given the same budget and time? Probably. But no one else is making an MMO that competes with Star Citizen, at least for the features that a lot of us are looking for. So we're stuck with them until someone else comes along.